April 12, 2006 | Narus Not in the Know

Elise Ackerman at the San Jose Mercury News has some great follow-up reporting today on ex-AT&T employee-cum-whistleblower Mark Klein's public statement last week, which included allegations that a secret NSA spying room wired into to AT&T's internet switching station in San Francisco was home to a piece of data-mining equipment known as a Narus STA 6400.

The engineers at Narus weren't intending to create Big Brother's dream machine when they began writing software a decade ago to help phone companies send out more detailed bills.

But as the Mountain View company's code became more and more sophisticated, customers began to discover new uses for software that was originally designed to monitor and analyze network traffic.

Now Narus finds itself at the center of a legal fight over domestic spying.

[...]

Narus executives confirm AT&T is a customer but say they do not know how the telecommunications giant uses its software. ``Once our customers buy our product, it's relatively opaque to us,'' said Steve Bannerman, vice president of marketing.

Narus CEO Greg Oslan said the company's software is designed to allow carriers to monitor all Internet traffic, including Web searches, e-mail content and attachments, and Internet phone calls.

Full story here.

Posted by Ryan Singel at April 12, 2006 12:39 PM

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